Tom Brady, for example, started 62 games (with two additional substitute appearances) during his first five seasons and made it to two Pro Bowls, producing 83 points of value for his team.1 He was taken with the 199th overall pick, so our study compared him to every other quarterback from that 11-year stretch who was selected between 189th and 209th in the draft. Those quarterbacks produced an average of 6.4 points of value, so Brady’s selection resulted in 76.6 points more than the average quarterback taken in that range of the draft. You get it, right? Imperfect, but it can serve as a reasonable starting point for these sorts of discussions.

As you might suspect, Brady rates out as the best selection at quarterback over that decade-long stretch, narrowly beating out Peyton Manning, who was at 71.9 points above his expectation as the first overall pick. Manning was better than Brady during their first five years, making three Pro Bowls, two All-Pro teams, and starting from Week 1 without missing a game, but Brady was selected in the sixth round, where virtually no quarterbacks turn into valuable properties. Our system says that he was relatively the better selection.